Once Upon a Wardrobe(64)

“Tell me the part about the trip to Dunluce,” George says. “And the castle.” He exhales the next words with a smile. “In Ireland.”

Ireland, the place his grandfather comes from, the land of wild dreams and adventures. We’ve taken him to visit many times, always on Christmas Eve Eve.

“Oh, we’ll get there,” I say.

“Go there now!” He is almost bursting.

“But all that comes before the castle matters just as much.”

George settles in and flips to the next page for me. “This is my favorite picture,” he says.

He points at a mighty drawing of Aslan standing behind a young Jack Lewis as Jack draws his own pictures in a little end room in Belfast. The image is colored in with the pencils I once brought to my brother from Blackwell’s bookshop. “My favorite too, love,” I say. “Mine too.”

Outside, wind rattles the new leaves of the beech tree against the glass. It is March. Spring is moving, hidden beneath the hard and cold ground, rising up to new life.

I read to my grandson. I read of meeting Mr. Lewis after Warnie found me hiding in the woodlands behind their house. I read to him of Mr. Lewis’s life stories that twist and spin into and out of Narnia. I read of George’s adventures in his imagination, and I read of our journey to Dunluce Castle. At each page, I pause for my grandson to stare at the sketches of Aslan near young Jack Lewis: in an attic where Jack is writing of Boxen; in the classroom of a horrid boarding school; in the trenches of France; in an office at Oxford. The well-wrought sketches change from page to page, the lion’s expression as wise or as caring or as fierce as the scene demands.

I am near the end when we’re interrupted by a deep voice.

“Hello, my loves.” Padraig enters carrying a stack of wood. My heart reaches for him; it has never stopped moving toward him since the evening at the castle, or maybe even before, on a bridge over the River Cherwell when he ran after me to walk me halfway to the Kilns.

Padraig’s hair is silver, pure silver, as if a child with a paint box took his bright red curls and painted them. His face is lined with wrinkles to mark his smiles. Twenty bestsellers my husband has written now, fairy tales and legends of the Irish countryside, even while tutoring at Merton for all these years. But the book young George and I are reading?

Once Upon a Wardrobe.

I wrote it.

My brother illustrated it. Of course, he hadn’t known he was illustrating a book; he merely drew while I told him stories.

The book came later.

Much later.

Padraig drops the logs into the fire and comes to kiss us both. “What part are we on?”

“The end,” George says, “until we read it again.”

I look up to Padraig, and he smiles down at me with that crooked and dear grin that melts everything in me. I think of the first time I knew what that smile meant—on my front porch on Christmas morning—but it was at my brother’s final good-bye that I knew for sure.

It was the end of 1950 when we bid farewell to my brother. The whole village was there. Almost everyone to the end of every lane had come for my family. They whispered and they cried and they kept their eyes downcast.

I sat on the front row with Mum and Dad, and I wasn’t crying because I’d cried as much as one body knows how to weep. I’d believed—fool that I was—that because I knew this end was coming, I was prepared, that I would not grieve as I had. As if one can pre-grieve and get it out of the way. It’s not true. Grief is the price I paid for loving fiercely, and that was okay, because there was no other choice but to love fiercely and fully.

In the church, I hadn’t looked behind me, because I knew I’d have to stand and speak, and I didn’t want to see all the familiar and mournful faces. Mum and Dad had asked me to talk about George. It wasn’t customary, getting up and speaking in such a way at an Anglican service where the priest usually just reads the Book of Common Prayer pages for the Burial of the Dead, but I’d said yes. George would have wanted me to say something. I knew he would. That didn’t make it easier, just necessary, and there was a difference.

When I stood and walked to the center of the church and faced the pews, I saw Mr. Lewis and Warnie in the third row. Next to Mr. Lewis sat Padraig Cavender himself. I was already shaking, and to see their sorrowful faces made my hands flutter like wings, almost sending my handwritten pages to the stone floor. The choir sang a gorgeous hymn in Latin, a hymn whose words I knew in English, but for some reason the Latin itself was squeezing my heart in grief.

“Come, Thou fount of every blessing . . .”

The choir finished. Padraig gave me a sad smile and nodded as if to say, or as if I imagined him to say, “You can do this.”

I was scared. All the thoughts flew through my mind at once like a flock of wild birds. I thought about George and his last breath with his gaze on the wardrobe. I thought of Mr. Lewis and Warnie and the Kilns’ warmth and books. I thought of Padraig’s kiss. I thought of the snow outside and how George would never again see spring, or not the kind of spring we would see when the baby lambs were birthed and the crocuses burst from the ground. George’s would be a new spring I couldn’t yet see.

I thought how we are never, any of us, in one place at a time, but in our minds and in our imaginations we are many places all at once. We were here and there at the same time; it was my body in a black dress at the front of the church, but my heart was with George.